Help make a great Mac browser!

Posted on Sunday, November 22, 2009 at 3:15pm PST by Smokey Ardisson

In the days since the release of Camino 2, we’ve been thrilled by the positive response it has received. We love making a great Mac web browser, and we’re very happy that you like to use it. One of the most common criticisms we’ve heard is one we often make of ourselves: we don’t move fast enough. Part of this is our reputation for the high bar of quality we set for releases, but most of this is due to available manpower. We’re a small, all-volunteer, open source project, not some skunkworks arm of a major corporation.

Clearing up persistent misconceptions about Camino

Contrary to what you may have read in some misinformed news coverage of the Camino 2 release, Camino is not a project of “the same people who make Firefox.” Camino is an all-volunteer project, and while the Mozilla Foundation generously serves as the legal organization representing the Camino Project and provides ancillary support services (build machines, version control and bug tracking systems, and release mirrors), as the Foundation does for other “community projects,” that’s where the connection begins and ends. No one is earning a salary to work on Camino, there are no Mozilla Foundation or Corporation employees whose job descriptions include caring for Camino, and, incidentally, Camino is in no way “draining resources from Firefox.” Camino does usually benefit from work Mozilla Corporation employees do on the Gecko rendering engine, but that’s only an added bonus all around; the Mozilla Corporation employees are doing that work to make Firefox better.

How you can help

The Camino Project is made up of a small, diverse group of volunteers who work on Camino on nights, weekends, and other bits of spare time. Our developers range from pilots to students and software developers. Unlike browsers produced by companies with dozens of full-time employes assigned to develop, test, and release the product, Camino has less than one full-time person worth of developer time, spread out over approximately five people. Because we’re a small team, everyone has a chance to make an impact, and having more people can make a noticeable difference in our progress. How can you help your favorite browser?

If you know some Cocoa and Objective-C, there are plenty of opportunities to help out without having to go near C++ or Gecko/XPCOM. You don’t have to be an Objective-C rockstar, either; we can help take Objective-C beginners and turn them into developers with 100 bugfixes in a year. We have a development section on our wiki with overviews, build instructions, and other helpful information, and you can also talk with us on IRC.

If you also know C++ and aren’t afraid to get your hands a bit dirty with Mozilla’s XPCOM, we have some bigger projects that require some plumbing in Gecko and our embedding layer. (If you like working at even lower levels, there are also some bugs in the Breakpad crash reporting library we’d like fixed.)

If you’re bilingual or a polyglot, our localization teams are always looking for new members to help out existing teams and to localize Camino into new languages.

Even if you just consider yourself a “normal user,” there are things you can do to help, too. Stop by the Camino forum on mozillaZine and see if you can help answer questions; maybe you’re a web developer and can look into why a website might be acting strangely for another user. Tell your friends about Camino; we also have a number of badges you can display on your website, blog, or profile page.

If we didn’t mention your skillset and you want to help out, let us know; there’s likely something you can do, too.

In short, there are opportunities for just about everyone to contribute to help make Camino even better. You don’t have to produce 100 patches to make a difference, either; every bit of code contributed is one more feature for Camino users to enjoy (or one less bug to annoy them). Thank you again for being Camino users; we appreciate your support, and we hope some of you will consider helping make Camino an ever better Mac browser.

Update on Camino 2 crashes

Posted on Sunday, November 21, 2009 at 3:15pm PST by Smokey Ardisson

Since Camino 2 was released on Wednesday afternoon, we’ve been analyzing the early crash reports, looking for patterns and filing bugs. Since this is the first time since the release of Camino 0.8 that all Camino users have been able to report crashes automatically, we weren’t quite sure what to expect. Besides the usual plug-in crashes (especially Flash Player), we’ve identified some common crashes that we can either help alleviate already or crashes where we’d like more information from those of you who are, unfortunately, experiencing them.

Crashes on startup

Most frustrating are the crashes that occur on startup because, if they are persistent crashes, they prevent you from using Camino at all (and they also prevent you from using the about:crashes feature to learn more about your crashes). Early indications are that there are three common startup crashes: one caused by corrupt fonts on Mac OS X 10.6, one caused by internet plug-ins, and one that seems related to color management.

Corrupt fonts

The good news is that the most common of these startup crashes, a crash in MacOSFontEntry::GetFontID caused by corrupt fonts on Mac OS X 10.6, is already fixed in Camino 2.0.1pre nightly builds. If you’re using Mac OS X 10.6 and crashing on startup, this is probably the crash you’re seeing, and using the nightly build of what will very soon become Camino 2.0.1 should fix the crashes. We also recommend that you use Font Book to validate your fonts and remove any corrupt ones (as well as to check for duplicate fonts), since corrupt and duplicate fonts can cause problems for other applications and the system.

Internet Plug-ins

A second common startup crash is a crash in dlopen related to detecting installed plug-ins. If you have plug-ins installed other than the common QuickTime Plugin.plugin, Flash Player.plugin, and the JavaPluginCocoa.bundle, try removing the other plug-ins from Internet Plug-Ins folder inside the Library folder in your user’s Home folder and in the Internet Plug-Ins folder inside the Library folder at the root of your hard disk. If Camino launches successfully, you can quit Camino, add plug-ins back one by one, and relaunch Camino until you find the plug-in that is triggering the crash. When you figure out which plug-in is causing the crash, please let us know, either by posting in the forum or by filing a bug, so that we can try to stop the crash in the future.

Color Management

The final common startup crash is in gfxPlatform::GetCMSOutputProfile, which is code related to the (off-by-default) color management feature. If you have enabled the color management hidden preference and are crashing on startup, try launching Camino with a fresh profile using the Troubleshoot Camino utility. If Camino launches successfully, you can remove the color management preference from the prefs.js (and possibly user.js, if it exists) file in your Camino profile (the Camino inside the Application Support folder inside the Library folder in your user’s Home folder). At this time we don’t know much about this crash, so if you are experiencing it, please let us know so that we can obtain more information and try to stop the crash in the future.

Crashes customizing the toolbar

If you crash when trying to customize the toolbar, make sure that you do not have the third-party 1Password software installed. 1Password does not currently support Camino 2, and all current versions of the 1Password software are incompatible with Camino 2. If you have 1Password installed and crash when customizing the toolbar, you should uninstall 1Password’s Camino integration and contact 1Password support.

Crashes with Google Desktop installed

Google Desktop’s Camino integration is a common way of triggering a crash in Gecko’s code for drawing form controls. If you have Google Desktop installed and frequently crash randomly while browsing, visit about:crashes to look up the crash reports you have sent. If the “signature” in one or more of your crash reports contains nsNativeThemeCocoa::DrawPushButton, you are experiencing this crash, and you should uncheck “Web History” in the “Indexing” tab of Google Desktop’s preferences.

If you’re having trouble figuring out why you are crashing (for instance, if you are crashing at startup and don’t know whether your crashes are the ones described above), stop by the Camino forum on mozillaZine and ask for help. In addition, if you are experiencing persistent crashes, please let us know, either by posting in the forum or by filing a bug. If we’ve already learned about your crash, there’s a good chance that we can point you to a version of Camino containing a fix for the crash or at least supply a work-around in the interim. If we haven’t heard of your crash before, letting us know about it is the first step to making it go away. As always, thank you for using Camino.

Camino 2.0 Released!

Posted on Wednesday, November 18, 2009 at 2:00pm PST by Samuel Sidler

After over a year of hard work, the Camino Project is proud announce Camino 2.0, a major new update to the Camino web browser.

Camino 2.0 includes a number of new features and enhancements, including rearranging tabs by drag-and-drop, a new Tab Overview feature, phishing and malware protection, full content zoom, Growl notifications for downloads, improved support for Full Keyboard Access in the browser window, and displays web content using Mozilla’s Gecko 1.9 rendering engine. For a list of features in Camino, visit our features page. Also, see the release notes for more detailed information about changes in Camino 2.0.

Camino 2.0 is available today in 14 languages:

Chinese (Simplified)

Danish

Dutch

English (US)

French

German

Italian

Japanese

Norwegian (Bokmål)

Russian

Slovenian

Spanish (Castellano)

Swedish

Turkish

One other language, Polish, is expected to be available in the near future.

As always, you can download Camino 2.0 in English (or the multilingual version) from our website, and existing Camino users will receive this release via software update. Camino 2.0 is available for users of Mac OS X 10.4 or later.

Camino 2.0 Beta 4 contains several notable improvements, including phishing and malware protection, enhanced AppleScript capabilities, a new crash reporting system that works on all Macs, Growl notifications for completed downloads, support for rearranging tabs by drag and drop, the ability to disable “Block Flash animation” on a per-site basis, tab overview, full content zoom, better support for Full Keyboard Access in the browser window, and a “Recently Closed Pages” menu. Camino 2.0 Beta 4 also has all of the improvements in version 1.9.0 of Mozilla’s Gecko rendering engine, leading to better performance with popular plug-ins and enhanced support for web standards.

Phishing and Malware Protection for Camino

Posted on Wednesday, August 12, 2009 at 11:15am PDT by Smokey Ardisson

Yesterday’s (August 11) Camino 2 nightly builds include a new feature, phishing and malware protection. Phishing, or criminals attempting to trick people into providing personal and financial information by using fake copies of trusted websites, and malware, or malicious software designed to take over a computer and/or steal information from a computer, are two common dangers for users of the web.

When Sean Murphy began implementing this feature in Camino in March of 2008, we had no idea it would be over a year and a half before we were able to ship a nightly with the protection turned on. During this time, the service we were using underwent many design changes, and, once we had adapted to those, we still spent several months finishing small pieces of our implementation and tweaking the user interface elements (in fact, there are few more small changes still to come). Nevertheless, the phishing and malware protection feature is now complete to the point where we feel it’s ready to be turned on, and, because of the widespread nature of these criminal websites, we’re excited to offer this protection and to help keep Camino users safe from these malicious websites.

Like Firefox, Safari, and Google Chrome, which also offer phishing and malware protection, Camino uses the Safe Browsing service from Google. We’d like to extend special thanks to our friends at Google for providing this service and for helping us getting it up and running in Camino.

For those of you interested in more technical details: Camino does not send any personal information (e.g., the website you are visiting) to Google’s Safe Browsing service. Instead, Camino periodically downloads hashes of URLs of websites that Google has identified as potentially malicious. When you start to visit a website in Camino (with Warn me when visiting potentially malicious websites checked in the Security preference pane), Camino creates a hash of the website’s URL and compares that to the list of hashes downloaded from the Safe Browsing service. If the hashes match, Camino will display a warning instead of displaying the website (visit our testpages to see an example).

Camino will continue to download updated hashes of potentially dangerous websites on a regular basis (it takes about five minutes after launch to get the first update, and updates are done in small chunks over time for bandwidth considerations), but criminals are constantly creating new phishing and malware sites, so we cannot promise every single malicious website will be blocked. It’s also possible that Google’s Safe Browsing service will incorrectly identify a site as being dangerous when it is not, or there may be a delay between when an infected site has been cleaned up by its owner and when the Safe Browsing service gives the “all clear” on the site. Though it is not perfect, we believe the phishing and malware protection is very effective and offers a friendly, easy-to-understand way of improving security for all Camino users, and we hope you find it useful, too.

Summer of Camino 2009!

Posted on Thursday, June 11, 2009 at 11:45am PDT by Smokey Ardisson

It’s that time of year again; the calendar has flipped over to June, and, here in the northern hemisphere, students are out of school for the summer. It also means it’s time for the annual Summer of Code program sponsored by Google. We are fortunate once again to have a student hacking on Camino, Dan Weber. Dan comes to us from San Francisco State University, where he’s a computer science major. A long-time Camino user, Dan will be working this summer on bringing some Camino-flavored awesomeness to our location bar and autocomplete window. You can read Dan’s project proposal on the Camino Wiki and follow his work via his blog at summerofcamino.com. Please join us in giving Dan a warm Camino welcome!

Camino 2.0 Beta 3 contains several notable improvements, including enhanced AppleScript capabilities, a new crash reporting system that works on all Macs, Growl notifications for completed downloads, support for rearranging tabs by drag and drop, the ability to disable “Block Flash animation” on a per-site basis, tab overview, full content zoom, better support for Full Keyboard Access in the browser window, and a “Recently Closed Pages” menu. Camino 2.0 Beta 3 also has all of the improvements in version 1.9.0 of Mozilla’s Gecko rendering engine, leading to better performance with popular plug-ins and enhanced support for web standards.

Camino is a Webware 100 Finalist!

Posted on Wednesday, April 15, 2009 at 9:00pm PDT by Smokey Ardisson

If you’re not a Twitter user and following Mike Pinkerton or the Camino Project, or you didn’t see this article from Mozilla Links, you may not have seen some exciting Internet news. It seems that Camino is a finalist in the Browsing category of the 2009 Cnet Webware 100 awards! While a number of other browsers also made the cut (including all the usual suspects), Camino is the only browser on the list built by volunteers, so we’re doubly honored to be included.

Voting runs through April 30, so if you’re a Camino fan, you can vote on this page. (You can access all the Webware 100 categories here and vote for your favorite sites and programs in other categories.)

Camino is popping up everywhere in 2009, and with Camino 2 coming later in the year with tab dragging, tab overview, Growl support, and more, we’re sure to see even more exposure. If you’d like to get involved with a great volunteer-made web browser, we’re always looking for help, whether your skills are as a programmer, a tester, a localizer, or something else!

Camino and the 2009 Google Summer of Code

Posted on Thursday, March 26, 2009 at 7:20pm PDT by Smokey Ardisson

As Mike Pinkerton announced previously, the Camino Project is once again participating in the Google Summer of Code (we’re listed under the Mozilla Project). We’re looking for student developers interested in making a meaningful contribution to Mac software used by hundreds of thousands. Past projects, such as the scrollable tab bar in Camino 1.6 and the tab overview feature in the Camino 2 preview releases, have been great experiences for student developers, the Camino Project, and our users who ultimately benefit from the new features.

We have provided a list of project suggestions on our wiki to get you started, but if you have your own idea, we’re interested in hearing about it. Google’s deadline for student applications for this summer’s program is Friday, April 3, 2009; if you’re interested in working on a Camino project, you still have a week to develop and polish your application. See Google’s 2009 Summer of Code home page for more information on deadlines and the application process.

We look forward to receiving applications for this summer, and we wish all applicants good luck!

Camino 2.0 Beta 2 contains several notable improvements, including Growl notifications for completed downloads, support for rearranging tabs by drag and drop, the ability to disable “Block Flash animation” on a per-site basis, tab overview, full content zoom, better support for Full Keyboard Access in the browser window, and a “Recently Closed Pages” menu. Camino 2.0 Beta 2 also has all of the improvements in version 1.9.0 of Mozilla’s Gecko rendering engine, leading to better performance with popular plug-ins and enhanced support for web standards.